Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution:
Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere
James Seaton
Michigan State University
Do novels or poems of high literary merit provide any particular
guidance about the idea of revolution, or can we say only that different novels and poems express different points of view? Part of
the issue, certainly, depends on how and where one draws the line
in regard to the works worth considering. There are those who
would argue that even if one can agree on a common list of literary classics, moral chaos reigns among the great works themselves,
whether they are novels, poems or plays. Richard Posner, arguing
that literature has no wisdom to offer about the nature of justice,
declares that “the world of literature is a moral anarchy; immersion in it teaches moral relativism.”1 Declaring that “the classics
are full of moral atrocities . . . that the author apparently approved
of,” he cites the apparent approval of “rape, pillage, murder, human and animal sacrifice, concubinage, and slavery in the Iliad,”
“anti-Semitism in more works of literature than one can count, including works by Shakespeare and Dickens.” He points to novels
of high literary merit that “disparage the modern project of liberty
and equality” and others that “presuppose an organization of society in which a leisured, titled, or educated upper crust lives off the
sweat of the brow of a mass of toilers at whose existence the novelist barely hints” (312). Claiming that moral wisdom is unrelated to
James Seaton is Professor of English at Michigan State University.
1
Richard Posner, Law and Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 311. Subsequent quotations from this work are identified by
page number in the text.
86 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
James Seaton
aesthetic quality, Posner argues that “the moral content of a work
of literature . . . is merely the writer’s raw material—something he
works up into a form to which morality is no more relevant than
the value of sculptor’s clay as a building material is relevant to the
artistic value of the completed sculpture” (313). If Posner is correct,
then it would surely be a waste of time to consult even the best
novels or poems about revolution, because they would not have
any wisdom to offer, about revolutions or anything else.
Posner’s thesis that aesthetic merit has nothing to do with
moral insight is, parodoxically, affirmed with the kind of persuasive power that only imaginative literature possesses in one of
the great contemporary novels about the idea of revolution, Milan
Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere.2 (“Idea of revolution,” rather than revolution itself, since the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in
1948 was more like a coup than a revolution, though its partisans
thought of it as a true revolution.) It should be emphasized at the
outset that although Posner’s thesis is certainly affirmed in Life is
Elsewhere, it is also significantly narrowed. Lyric poetry, according
to Life is Elsewhere, may have great aesthetic merit despite lacking
truth and insight, but novels do not have such leeway. In any case,
Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere provides an excellent test case
both for Posner’s thesis and as a starting point for inquiry into the
relation between the idea of revolution on the one hand and novels
and poems on the other. Jaromil, the protagonist of Life is Elsewhere,
is a passionate supporter of the 1948 Communist revolution in
Czechoslovakia and, not incidentally, a lyric poet. It is central to
the novel that the reader believe Jaromil is indeed a gifted poet,
a poet in the tradition of Shelley, Keats, and Rimbaud, to each
of whom—and many other famous poets—Jaromil is repeatedly
compared throughout the novel. The novel demonstrates how the
same impulses and attitudes that lead Jaromil to become a poet
also shape his enthusiasm for what he sees as a true revolution—
even though his uncle calls it a “putsch,” adding sarcastically: “It’s
easy to make a revolution when you’ve got the army and the police
and a certain big country behind you” (170). The uncle, who is so
uncultured that he believes “Voltaire had invented volts” (172),
understands what is going on very well: “The Communists had
2
Life is Elsewhere, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). This
edition supersedes the earlier translation by Peter Kussi (New York: Viking Penguin,
1986). Quotations from Life is Elsewhere are identified by page number in the text.
Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution
Humanitas • 87
Aesthetic
merit in art
does not
guarantee
truth and
insight.
most of the power already, and they made this putsch so they
could have all of it” (171). Jaromil, on the other hand, gives his
mother an explanation that is more hopeful but less accurate: “He
explained to Mama that what was happening was a revolution,
and that a revolution is a brief period when recourse to violence is
necessary in order to hasten the arrival of a society in which violence is forbidden” (173).
Jaromil’s enthusiasm for revolution is in part the result of the
lessons he has learned from the avant-garde poets and painters of
the interwar generation. He learned, for example, “that the word
‘bourgeois’ was an insult; bourgeois are people who want paintings to be lifelike, to imitate nature,” but, his tutor told him, “we
can laugh at the bourgeois because (and Jaromil was delighted by
this idea!) they were long since dead and did not know it” (43-44).
For the young Jaromil “the future consisted of unknown distances
in which a vague image of revolution (the painter often spoke
of its inevitability) merged with a vague image of the bohemian
freedom of poets” (133). But Jaromil also has his own, intensely
personal reasons for looking forward to a revolution. When his
mother humiliates him by combing his “carefully disheveled hair”
while she carries on a conversation with her friends, “the great
poet, who had a diabolical imagination and looked like Rilke, sat
quietly, crimson with fury, letting himself be combed; all he could
do was wear his cruel grin (the one he had been practicing for
years) and let it harden on his face.” When his mother is not only
not intimidated by his “cruel grin” but even jokes about it to her
friends, “Jaromil swore that he would always be on the side of
those who want radically to change the world” (152).
Throughout the novel the notion that a real revolution rightly
demands absolute, unquestioning commitment is presented as the
political and social equivalent of the notion in personal life that
love, if it is real, requires an absolute commitment against which
other concerns become meaningless. The first time this conception
of love is voiced occurs when the avant-garde painter, seducing
Jaromil’s mother, responds to her qualms by telling her: “Yes, it’s
crazy. Love is either crazy or it’s nothing at all” (52). Jaromil’s first
lover, identified only as the “girl with glasses,” declares to Jaromil
that “I believe that when it comes to love there’s no such thing
as compromise. When you’re in love you must give everything”
(165). One might think that this belief in the absoluteness of love
88 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
James Seaton
might come into conflict with an absolute commitment to revolution, but Jaromil has no trouble uniting the two. Angry because
his girlfriend arrives late for an assignation, he becomes even
angrier when she tells him that she was delayed by her brother,
who plans to leave Czechoslovakia for the West. Jaromil surprises
the girlfriend, identified only as “the redhead,” by insisting that
she must inform on her brother to the police; if she does not do
so, he will. It is not that politics conflicts with and overrides love;
instead he thinks to himself that he “had exposed the redhead to
danger not because love didn’t matter to him”; what he “wanted
was precisely a world in which man and woman would love each
other more than ever. Yes, that’s how it was.” He “had exposed his
girl to danger precisely because he loved her more than other men
loved their women; precisely because he knew what love and the
future world of love were” (356). It is clear that Jaromil knows little more about the revolution
he embraces than he does about the lovers whom he thinks of
only as “the girl with glasses” and “the redhead.” Jaromil does
not know, for example, “that people had been arrested by the
thousands, Communists among them, that they were tortured, and
that their crimes were mostly imaginary” (293). This ignorance
does not, however, prevent Jaromil from writing powerful lyric
poems praising the revolution. There is a natural affinity, it seems,
between revolution and lyric poetry: “Lyricism is intoxication, and
man drinks in order to merge more easily with the world. Revolution has no desire to be examined or analyzed, it only desires that
the people merge with it; in this sense it is lyrical and in need of
lyricism” (261-62). The narrator explains that it is possible to write
beautiful poetry on behalf of tyranny because in poetry intensity
of feeling, not truth, is the essential criterion: “in the magical territory of verse all assertions become true as long as they are backed
by the power of experienced emotion” (363). The narrator sums up
the role of poetry in the era of Stalinist rule in Czechoslovakia in
an eloquent indictment: “Nowadays everyone regards it as an era
of political trials, persecution, forbidden books, and judicial murder. But we who remember must bear witness: that was not only a
time of horror but also a time of lyricism! The poet reigned along
with the hangman” (363).
Kundera’s novel demonstrates convincingly what happens
when the celebration of extremity and intensity of feeling in poLyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution
Humanitas • 89
It is
possible
to write
beautiful
poetry in
behalf of
tyranny.
etry is transposed into politics, where extremity and intensity
are associated with revolution and emotional moderation with
conservatism. What the novel cannot demonstrate but asks the
reader to believe is that its protagonist, Jaromil, was indeed a
fine poet, despite his political folly. The narrator claims that poets
who praised the revolution and the regime it installed “often left
behind beautiful verse” (363), even though there is now no doubt
that the regime they hailed was an ugly tyranny. Is Richard Posner
then justified in claiming that aesthetic merit has nothing to do
with moral insight, at least in regard to lyric poetry?
Before answering that question, we might consider the work of
Shelley’s
one of the poets to whom Jaromil is compared most often, Percy
humanitarian Bysshe Shelley. George Santayana argued that Shelley’s poetic
idealism
greatness remains even when one recognizes the folly of his politidangerous.
cal enthusiasms.3 Santayana points out that Shelley’s humanitarian idealism would be dangerous if there were any possibility
that it could be implemented: “Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of
which he does not suspect the possible cruelty, would impose his
ideal of love and equality upon all creatures” (171), adding that
Shelley’s “sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity”
(172). Warning that Shelley’s poetry misleads about politics, society and human nature, Santayana argues that it may nevertheless
reveal certain aspects of human experience all the more powerfully because it focuses on them alone: “Being a singer inwardly
inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal goals of life, the ultimate
joys of experience, better than a discursive critic or observer could
have done” (183). One of the tasks of criticism, Matthew Arnold
suggests in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” is to
appreciate and evaluate “elements that for the fullness of spiritual
perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which
in the practical sphere may be maleficent.”4 Poems like Shelley’s
“Ode to the West Wind” illustrate Arnold’s point. Would-be revo3
“Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles,” Winds of Doctrine
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 155-85. Quotations from this essay are identified by page number in the text. Although this essay appears in the original 1913
edition of Winds of Doctrine, it is omitted from the version of Winds of Doctrine published in 1937 as part of Volume VII of the Triton edition of Santayana’s collected
works.
4
Matthew Arnold: Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (London: Penguin, 1970),
130-57, 153.
90 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
James Seaton
lutionaries looking for literary inspiration might take Shelley’s
“Ode to the West Wind” as a call for violence that would cause as
much destruction as the “Black rain, and fire, and hail” that the
west wind will cause to “burst” on the world. In Shelley’s poem
the west wind is both “Destroyer and preserver”; the wind is
the herald first of winter but ultimately of spring, as the rhetorical question that ends the poem promises: “If Winter comes, can
Spring be far behind?” There is no assurance, of course, that any
revolutionary violence that might be inspired or justified by the
poem will similarly lead to the creation of a new and better society. The greatness of Shelley’s poem, then, depends on the ability
of the reader to divorce the poem from its merely political implications and read it as a dramatic presentation of a movement from
fear and despair to hope and possibility. Santayana compares Shelley’s poetry to music that possesses emotional resonance without
specific reference to actual events: “Music is surely no description
of the circumstance of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably,
for it stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements
and images the formal and emotional possibilities of living in the
spirit” (182). “Ode to the West Wind” may be a great poem, even if
Shelley’s politics are entirely mistaken. Though it is clear enough
that “Ode to the West Wind” is about more than the weather, the
poem makes no direct reference to politics, leaving the reader free
to appreciate the poem on other grounds—for example, its union
of formal control with a celebration of wildness. In contrast, Shelley’s “Sonnet: England in 1819” is much more specific, much more
directly political—and a much weaker poem. Just like “Ode to the
West Wind,” it closes with a vision of hope, but it is a long way
aesthetically if not politically from “If Winter comes, can Spring
be far behind?” to “ . . . a glorious Phantom may/Burst to illumine
our tempestuous day.”
But if lyric poetry, however great, cannot be trusted for political
guidance, why should we turn to the novel? Why was it that the
novels in praise of Stalinism were bad novels, while at least some
of the poems praising the same regime were successful works of
art? The narrator draws a distinction between poetry and novels:
“Novelists, who wrote about that time with the blind eyes of conformism, created mendacious, stillborn works. But lyrical poets,
who exalted the time in an equally blind manner, often left behind
beautiful verse” (363). While the narrator of Life is Elsewhere ofLyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution
Humanitas • 91
Intense
emotion a
frequent
source of
illusion.
fers a series of interesting comments about lyric poetry, he says
very little about novels. The work itself, however, demonstrates
the difference between the world of poetry, in which intensity is
the criterion of truth, and the world of the novel, in which intense
emotion is repeatedly shown to be a source of illusion. In episode
after episode the narration allows readers to see the disjunction
between the self-dramatizing conceptions of the characters, especially but not only Jaromil, and the undramatic actuality. Jaromil
first gets the notion that he is a real artist when an avant-garde
painter praises his youthful drawings of human beings with dogs’
faces. The painter enthuses to Jaromil’s mother that her son’s
drawings reveal deep intuitions about the era of World War II:
“Don’t you feel there’s some kind of link between your son’s vision and the war that shakes us every hour of our lives? Hasn’t
the war deprived man of his face and head? Aren’t we living in a
world where headless men only desire decapitated women? Isn’t a
realistic vision of the world the emptiest of illusions? Aren’t your
son’s childish drawings much more truthful?” (48). This is indeed
eloquent, and one might be convinced of Jaromil’s rare powers
of intuition if the narrator had not revealed the truth: “Jaromil of
course knew very well that he had made this admired discovery
of dog-headed humans by chance, purely because he couldn’t
draw a human face” (38). The first woman to whom Jaromil makes
love, the one known as the redhead, tells him after they go to bed
that she had been aware for a long time that he had desired her;
she has seen him waiting outside the store where she worked as a
salesgirl: “I noticed it when you came to the store. I know that you
waited for me outside. . . . You didn’t dare talk to me, because I
was never alone. But I knew that someday you’d be here with me.
Because I wanted you too” (246). The narrator, however, has told a
different story. Jaromil has indeed waited outside the store, but he
has not been waiting for the red-headed salesgirl:
The store closes at six, and he positions himself at the opposite
corner. He knows that the cashier always quits work a little after
six, but he also knows that she is always accompanied by one of
the salesgirls.
This friend is much less pretty, seeming almost ugly to Jaromil;
the two are exact opposites: the cashier is dark-haired, the other is a
redhead; the cashier is buxom, the other skinny; the cashier is quiet,
the other noisy; he feels mysteriously close to the cashier, repelled
by the other. (222)
92 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
James Seaton
Even Jaromil’s denunciation of his girlfriend and the brother
escaping to the West, an act that seemed to him both tragic and
beautiful, “the only tragedy of our time that was worthy of beautiful verse, worthy of a great poem!” (356), turns out to be based on
a misunderstanding. His girlfriend, the reader eventually learns,
had not been late because she was attempting to dissuade her
brother from escaping but because she had taken too long explaining to a lover that she was leaving him for Jaromil, who “had
promised her a life” (379). She had made up the story about her
brother because she did not want to tell Jaromil about his rival.
Kundera argues in “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” that
not only Life is Elsewhere but the European novel as a genre should
be thought of as the “legacy of Cervantes.”5 It is the “depreciated
legacy of Cervantes,” because “the spirit of complexity” (18) characteristic of the novel is overwhelmed by the contemporary reduction of complexities into banalities. Though Kundera believes that
“the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe” (13-14),
he sees the forces of reduction as ultimately cultural rather than
political. The reductivism seemingly inherent in the mass media is
equally trivializing, whatever the politics:
the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media; as
agents of the unification of the planet’s history, the media amplify
and channel the reduction process; they distribute throughout the
world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by
the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind. And it doesn’t
much matter that different political interests appear in the various
organs of the media. Behind these surface differences reigns a common spirit. . . . This common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged
by political diversity, is the spirit of our time. And this spirit seems
to me contrary to the spirit of the novel” (17-18).
In “The Novel and Europe” Kundera identifies this spirit as
“kitsch”:
The word “kitsch” describes the attitude of those who want to
please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm
what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received
ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into
the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves . . . . Given the imperative necessity to please and
thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of
5
“The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda
Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 1-20. Quotations from this essay are identified by page number in the text.
Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution
Humanitas • 93
Contemporary
forces of
reduction
ultimately
cultural rather
than political.
the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as the mass media
come to embrace and to infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch
becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.6
The right not
to be judged
would entail
life without
meaning.
It is all too easy to interpret Kundera’s ideas about the spirit of
the novel in ways that lend themselves to the sort of doctrinaire
simplifications that embody the spirit of kitsch. In “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” Kundera asserts that the world of the
novel is “the world as ambiguity,” in which there is “not a single
absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths,” in which the
“only certainty” is “the wisdom of uncertainty (6-7). It is only a small
step, one in accord with the spirit of the age, to claim that the novel
presents a world with no truths at all, a world in which moral
relativism is the only intelligent philosophy. In “The Novel and
Europe” Kundera points out that the Anna Karenina of Tolstoy’s
published novel is a different and more attractive figure than the
Anna of the first draft, who was a “most unsympathetic woman”
whose “tragic end was entirely deserved and destroyed,” observing that in the novel “no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor
Karenin,” but “everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna
and Karenin” (159). It would be only a small step to move from
“the right to be understood” to the right not to be judged at all. The
border crossed when such small steps are taken is well described in
a passage from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on
the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions,
faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human
life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of,
and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from
it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.7
A careful reading of Kundera’s observations about the novel
suggests that they do not quite cross the border to unmeaning, but
in any case it is the novels themselves that embody the deeper insight, as the author himself would no doubt cheerfully concede. He
observes in “The Novel and Europe” that “great novels are always
a little more intelligent than their authors,” adding that “Novelists
6
“Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe,” The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda
Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 155-65, 163-64. Subsequent quotations from
this essay are identified by page number in the text.
7
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins. 1996), 281. This translation supersedes the earlier translation by Michael Henry
Heim (New York: Knopf, 1980).
94 • Volume XX, Nos. 1 and 2, 2007
James Seaton
who are more intelligent than their books should go into another
line of work” (158). If Kundera’s fiction, including Life is Elsewhere
with its emphasis on the gap between self-dramatizing illusions
and reality, is indeed representative of the tradition of the novel
since Cervantes, then the relation between the novel as a genre and
the idea of revolution is clear. Despite the emphasis in Kundera’s
essays on the “language of relativity and ambiguity” as characteristic of the novel as a genre, Life is Elsewhere has a number of implications that are quite straightforward. The danger of accepting even
the most beautiful lyric poetry as a source of political wisdom is
made unambiguously clear. Likewise, the novel is not ambiguous
about the failure of the Communist regime that took power in 1948
in Czechoslovakia to live up to its promises or even to fulfill the
basic requirements of a decent society. Above all, the folly of being
swept away by the seductive allure of revolutionary absolutism is
driven home repeatedly, convincingly and without ambiguity.
Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution
Humanitas • 95
Great novels
“always a
little more
intelligent
than their
authors.”